So far, Microsoft has been very tight-lipped about Windows 7, carefully trying to prevent another Longhorn PR disaster where the company promised the heavens and more for Longhorn, but in the end ditched Longhorn to make way for Vista. Chris Flores (Windows Client Communications Team) as well as Steven Sinofsky, has broken the silence a little bit to talk about Windows 7. In addition, it is believed Windows 7 will make its first official debut at the D6 All Things Digital conference today, during a keynote held by Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates.

"Redo Windows kernel". WTF? I am seeing this for the n-th time in this and other threads and I still do not understand. NT kernel is one of the best available. Do you suggest Microsoft should make something even more better?

I agree that graphical (explorer) shell could be improved. But IMHO it *WAS* improved quite a bit in Vista when compared to XP.

I am a very satisfied user of Vista x64 and in my opinion there is no better desktop operating system (yes, including Mac). If your hardware is not suitable to run Vista, you should use XP or linux, but Vista provides many benefits compared to them. Yes, it runs slow on ancient machines with <2GB RAM and Vista is not meant to run on them. But it does so much more than XP and is much more convenient.

My only negative aspect of Vista is its compatibility with older games because they do not get updates like other software. But I blame makers of these games and not Microsoft. If they were coded correctly they would run faultlessly on Vista just like many other older games do... And I notice that problems mostly arise from various crappy copy "protection" systems which try to install own drivers and other sh*t.

Interestingly however, my copy of GNU/Linux runs about 10 times faster and uses oh about 1/4 of the RAM that Vista does on this machine.

The WinNT kernel was good, when new, but since has aged badly and some rather horrendous faults were allowed to be replicated again and again. In comparison to the Linux kernel for example there are arguments both ways - but personally I think Linux has far more room for future growth and improvement, the cruft in WinNT is somewhat more entrenched.

Okay, you're clueless. What's not working with the Windows kernel is that it does require massive amounts of memory to run the basic O/S. In fact, a recent posting (can't find it right now) about an Intel engineer that benchmarked various tasks under different versions of Windows and Office found they were slower on Vista (on modern hardware) than on Windows 2000 on old hardware. That's right. You're upgrading to Vista to actually run slower on brand-spanking new hardware.

Windows suffers from another problem, which is 20+ years of cruft. Last time I was coding on Windows there were 3 different C API's for memory management. Only one was current but all three were supported so code going back to Windows 3.1 had a shot of running. It's time Microsoft dumped some of those API's the way Apple did with the Carbon migration prior to OS X. Why dump those old API's? Because they lock in old, out-dated concepts and practices, which can interfere with new kernel development. Even if they're just wrappers around the new API's, they should go the way of the do-do.

As recently as early releases of XP there are way too many reports of user programs causing kernel crashes. (And no, I'm not talking about buggy device drivers). These are instances of user programs passing bad parameters back to the Win32 functions causing Windows to BSOD. That should happen 0 times.

I've written software on Windows at various stages in my career since Windows NT 4 so that people can run businesses and make money. I've had the dubious pleasure of writing OCX and Active X controls, COM+ components, all the way through .NET GUI's. What was modern in the Windows NT 4 sense (circa 1997) is now no longer modern. It needs a facelift. It needs a cleanup. It needs to live well in a reasonable environment. It needs that because otherwise it becomes increasingly a dead weight instead of a useful tool.

Windows is not the best kernel available by any stretch of the imagination. For one thing, it lacks real time capabilities (which Windows CE ironically provides). The thread scheduler is counter intuitive. The filesystem is slow (especially over network shares). The part I especially love is the random waiting while network browsing returns information about computers, printers and networks. Windows isn't evil. It does need work. It would be nice to see Microsoft stop dicking around with Yahoo or Zune and focus on it's core competency, Operating Systems before it begins to look like it's core incompetency.

The "cruft" guarantees Windows the largest market share. Because so many applications and drivers run on Windows, people use it. Because so many people use it, applications and drivers will almost always target Windows.

Not just on the desktop but in support of things like cash registers, auto diagnostics, programming LMRs (radios), medical systems, ... These systems evolve slower than the desktop and there are far more of these than desktops. Their equipment investment is in decades. You just can't kick all those important users in the nuts and say "upgrade every business process end-to-end every few years to support our new OS." These customers just won't upgrade. MS doesn't get revenue if users don't upgrade. Therefore the "cruft."

RToS - Windows isn't running your brakes. RToSes have a different application and philosophy than GP OSes like Windows or Linux. That's why Windows CE and RTLinux are real-time and not the main desktop or server OSes.

This isn't a missed opportunity. The opportunity to "pull an OSX" was before they released Vista. But they did, so now it would make no (business) sense to start from scratch and break compatibility.

"We're very clear that drivers and software that work on Windows Vista are going to work really well on Windows 7; in fact, they'll work the same. We're going to not introduce additional compatibilities, particularly in the driver model."

Doesn't anyone else see why this is a great business move for them?? Vista adoption is slow, drivers have been lacking, people are still developing for XP, etc...So, you say, "Everything that will work on Vista will work perfectly on Windows 7", and now companies see a better reason to develop applications, and more importantly drivers, for Windows Vista. Kill the, "we'll just hold out for Windows 7" mentality, and in the process, give people a big motivation to adopt Vista.

And lets face it folks, no matter what they say, Windows 7 will NOT be out in early 2010 or whatever pipe dream they are pushing now.

"if they were coded correctly"? So Vista almost completely hosed backwards compatibility with Windows XP, and you blame the developers of older games who had no way of foreseeing what Microsoft were going to do in the future?